First Blog

One political type made an accurate point about all the Hillary emails, of which there have been thousands, that being none from Bernie or Donald have appeared.   He asked why we haven’t seen any from Trump?   Could be the Trump group has better security?   Absolute security is easy and almost free, if you want to use it.   It is a certainty that Hillary was careless about security.   The reason is simple.   Neither she nor her team fully understood how easy hacking can be.  One thing I've learned is many of those at premier levels do not respond well to new things.  To plea d ignorance or amat eur status , they expos e themselves to themselves and to others.  Old hands have trouble with new events and new concepts. So, they hide it or ignore what's happening.  Another reason exists, perhaps about Trump but certainly about others.   We generalize beyond Donald as he is unlikely to win the election.  Why can it not be so that multiple, maybe hundreds, of important po

According to experts, a definite possibility of voter results hacking exists.   For states that allow no paper trail of ballots (e.g. Louisiana, South Carolina), any hacking is undetectable and therefore unrecoverable. That is, the existence of hacking cannot be checked, and voter results cannot be verified.  Not good. With this possibility, it is a certainty that whoever loses the next election will accuse the other side of such interventions. We have seen hacking of US corporations as to intellectual property.   We have seen hacking of major retailers as to their customer records. We have seen hacking of the US government agency of citizen information.   We have even seen political party records hacked.   All must have had some security measures in place. Surely they have improved. Hope! Hope!   It seems that for municipal voting machines, with few measures directed against intruders, hacking might be quite a lot easier. In light of all the security failures of late, it seem

Many of you read that the FBI had an edge up on decrypting messages from the San Bernardino shooters.  It was reported that certain graphics could be decrypted.  Well and good.  See, http://used-ideas.blogspot.com/2016/03/messages-from-san-bernardino-shooters.html We were skeptical.  Now we see that the FBI did crack the Apple phone encryption without the help of Apple. Whew! An independent firm helped the FBI, we are told.  This is ridiculous.  Why?  Because if such decryption were possible within just a couple of months, it would have been done many more months sooner.  One could guess that Apple leaked information to Party A who in turn notified Party B, who then helped the FBI.  Apple's reputation is preserved.  Whew! What's next?  We may see is an announcement from Apple is that they have beefed up their iPhone security - maybe in the next upgrade.  They need to do this!  If Apple was using anything close to, say RSA security, the encryption would be impossible to dec

The FBI has now announced, and announced, and announced they may have a way to access the encrypted iPhone messages of the San Bernardino shooters, without the help of Apple.  Who cares? Mostly Apple customers.  Apple has a totally vested interest in maintaining security for their would-be customers. Help the FBI, and you help yourself out of business.  But then come some cryptic announcement from Johns Hopkins that they can penetrate encrypted graphics.  According to the Washington Post, a team of researchers led by Johns Hopkins University computer scientist Matthew Green has poked a hole in Apple's iMessage encryption software.  The FBI now claims it may no longer needs the help of Apple. Fantastic.  Decrypting images is somewhat different, but entirely similar, to decrypting messages, but the cat is out of the bag.  This tacitly makes it OK to for Apple to help the government.  And maybe they have done just that with a clever cover provided by an external agent.  What a

According to an article in the LA Times, Apple will oppose a judicial order to help FBI unlock the phone belonging to San Bernardino shooter.  This brings up an interesting conundrum.  First, the encryption programs currently in use are all but unbreakable with current technology.  The method, perhaps RSA, depends on extremely secure mathematical methods for which the amount of time to crack exceeds the capacity all current technology.  It can be assumed the terrorists used such technology.   (Heck, you can download it.  PGP is an example.) We have heard of current terrorists "going dark," which means they are using such technology.  All this is well known.  The FBI knows it, the NSA knows it, and all security agencies world-wide know it. So why is the Fed going after Apple?  Second, why are the Feds coming after Apple?  There are only a couple of reasons, one of which they are simply grandstanding a play to reveal they are still looking. Another is that Apply has built

Encryption  Lately, we've been hearing of peccadillos and possibly serious and illegal uses of email by high level national figures, e.g. General David Petraeus and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. In most cases, the messages have been read by unwanted persons, much to the unhappiness and ruination of the senders. If you really want your messages to be secure, you need to encrypt them, not with a secret code ring, but with secure but simple to use software. It is free and available. Creating encrypted messages . If you must or just want to send encrypted messages, you want something simple to use. There is an easy and secure method. We'll show you how to use it. It is based on what was once considered the "unbreakable" Vigenere cipher. While this cipher is no longer unbreakable, breaking it would require (i) a whole lot of text to work with and (ii) a very powerful computing apparatus, and (iii) the desire of some party to deprypt you messages . Indeed, the decr